From Module 1, have learned about different types of sleep disorders and you have assessed your sleeping status under COVID-19 time. This Module will introduce you to why it is important to keep a healthy sleep under this COVID-19 Pandemic time.
As the pandemic time become a new “normal” for everyone, people’s life is changing because of it. Whenever there is a change, people’s sleep might be effect by the lifestyle change too. Before we start with more theory, let's review a YouTube video Called: "How Coronavirus is Killing You in Your Sleep?"
As described in this video, there are a lot things happening during this special time might affect human's life and sleep:
Stress: During the pandemic time, people constantly under stress. They might affect by a lot of piece in their life: work, school, health, finances, or family. This might keep one’s mind active at night, making it difficult to sleep. Stressful life events or trauma — such as the death or illness of a loved one, divorce, or a job loss — also may lead to insomnia.Life or work schedule change: Disrupting your body's circadian rhythms can lead to insomnia. During COVID-19 pandemic time, everyone’s life changed a lot. Adult working from home, students’ study from home. People need time to adjust the change. Their sleep will affect by this tooPoor sleep habits: As most of the daily activities are happening at home right now. People easily using your bed for work, eating, or watching TV. Moreover, unexpected naps, stimulating activities before bed is also breaking one’s body circadian rhythms.Eating too much late in the evening: while people quarantine at home, there are not much they can do. And because of we all want to limit the time to out, usually people will buy more foods and supplies and store at home. It is easily to eat more than what people usually have.In order to understand why sleep is important under such special time. First, we need to understand what is sleep and why sleep is important to everyone.
Learning outcome:
After you read through this module, you will be able to:
Describe and evaluate how COVID-19 can affect everyone's life
List all the risk factors about sleep
Understand sleep stages
Assignment:
After reading through below information about sleep, please post your responds(300 - 400 words) to Forum discussion with below topics:
Have you had any nightmare during COVID-19 time?
Do you mind to share your experiences? (Optional)
Why you think healthy sleep is important at this time?
Share some strategy that you use to keep yourself in a more healthy lifestyle that will bring positive effect to your sleep at home during COVID-19 time?
After post your response, please also review other people's response and provide your comments below.
Overview of Healthy Sleep
Sleep as a important part in everyone's daily life have toke about 1/3 of time in our life. From National Institute of Health's article "Brain Basics: Understanding Sleep", it states that :
"Sleep affects almost every type of tissue and system in the body – from the brain, heart, and lungs to metabolism, immune function, mood, and disease resistance."
There are two basic type of sleep: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-REM sleep (which has three different stages). And sleep has been separate into 4 stages：
STAGE 1Sleep
During stage 1, people usually have very light sleep and our eyes and muscles active slowly.
STAGE 2 Sleep
When stage 2 start, eye move stops but brain wave become slower
STAGE 3&4 Sleep
Beginning of stage 3&4, people start deep sleep mode where brain wave become very slow and won't wake up easily.
During sleeping cycle, we ususally start with REM sleep at the first 90 mins. During this phase, eyes move fast along with frequency brain wave activity. Than people move to non-REM with different stage of sleep. These two types of sleep will cycle through during a tipical night and with a long NON-REM Stage 3&4 toward morning.
With different age of the people are, they need different length of sleep.
Importance of sleep under Pandemic
As we just discussed at beginning of this module, public's sleep has been affected by difference things during this Pandemic time and may cause stress, schedule changes and leading towards to a bad sleep.
Why sleep important during this time?
According to SleepFoundation.org, Sleep empowers an effective immune system. As eveyone is affected by the changes, try to maintain a healthy sleep become even important as this will help you fit with the "virus". Sleep heightens brain function and can enhances mood. Our mind works better when we get good sleep, contributing to complex thinking, learning, memory, and decision-making. Under such stressful time, a better sleep can give you more energy to deal with worsen feelings of depression. Based on research sleep is linked with mental health conditions like anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Extended Resource:
To prepare to next module, you could watch below video about: "The Importance of Sleep: 8 Scientific Health Benefits of Sleep + Sleeping Tips". This video have review the topic we covered in this module about important of sleep, also provide some tips which we will cover in next module.
Reference
The Characteristics of Sleep | Healthy Sleep. (2019). Harvard.Edu. http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/healthy/science/what/characteristics
What is Healthy Sleep? - National Sleep Foundation. (2019). Sleepfoundation.Org. https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/what-healthy-sleep
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